Category Archives: Live Migration

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I saw people team two 10GBps NICs for live migration and use TCP/IP. They leveraged LACP for this as per my blog Teamed NIC Live Migrations Between Two Hosts In Windows Server 2012 Do Use All Members . That was a nice post but not a commercial to use it. It was to prove a point that LACP/Static switch dependent teaming did allow for multiple VMs to be live migrated in the same direction between two node. But for speed, max throughput & low CPU usage teaming is not the way to go. This is not needed as you can achieve bandwidth aggregation and redundancy with SMB via Multichannel. This doesn’t require any LACP configuration at all and allows for switch independent aggregation and redundancy. Which is great, as it avoids stacking with switches that don’t do VLT, MLAG, …

Even when your team your NICs your better off using SMB. The bandwidth aggregation is often better. But again, you can have that without LACP NIC teaming so why bother? Perhaps one reason, with LACP failover is faster, but that’s of no big concern with live migration.

We’ll do some simple examples to show you why these choices matter. We’ll also demonstrate the importance of an optimize RSS configuration. Do not that the configuration we use here is not a production environment, it’s just a demo to show case results.

But there is yet another benefit to SMB. SMB Direct. That provides for maximum throughput, low latency and low CPU usage.

LACP NIC TEAM with 2*10Gbps with TCP

With RSS setting on the inbox default we have problems reaching the best possible throughput (17Gbps). But that’s not all. Look at the CPU at the time of live migration. As you can see it’s pretty taxing on the system at 22%.

If we optimize RSS with 8 RSS queues assigned to 8 physical cores per NIC on a different CPU (dual socket, 8 core system) we sometimes get better CPU overhead at +/- 12% but the throughput does not improve much and it’s not very consistent. It can get worse and look more like the above.

LACP NIC TEAM with 2*10Gbps with SMB (Multichannel)

With the default RSS Settings we still have problems reaching the best possible throughput but it’s better (19Gbps). CPU wise, it’s pretty taxing on the system at 24%.

If we optimize RSS with 8 RSS queues assigned to 8 physical cores per NIC on a different CPU (dual socket, 8 core system) we get better over CPU overhead at +/- 8% but the throughput actually declined (17.5 %). When we run the test again we were back to the results we saw with default RSS settings.

Is there any value in using SMB over TCP with LACP for live migration?

Yes there is. Below you see two VMs live migrate, RSS is optimized. One core per VM is used and the throughput isn’t great, is it. Depending on the speed of your CPU you get at best 4.5 to 5Gbps throughput per VM as that 1 core per VM is the limiting factor. Hence see about 9Gbps here, as there’s 2 VMs, each leveraging 1 core.

Now look at only one VM with RSS is optimized with SMB over an LACP NIC team. Even 1 large memory VM leverages 8 cores and achieves 19Gbps.

What about Switch Independent Teaming?

Ah well that consumes a lot less CPU cycles but it comes at the price of speed. It has less CPU overhead to deal with in regards to LACP. It can only receive on one team member. The good news is that even a single VM can achieve 10Gbps (better than LACP) at lower CPU overhead. With SMB you get better CPU distribution results but as the one member is a bottle neck, not faster. But … why bother when we have …better options!? Read on !

No Teaming – 2*10Gbps with SMB Multichannel, RSS Optimized

We are reaching very good throughput but it’s better (20Gbps) with 8 RSS queues assigned to 8 physical cores. The CPU at the time of live migration is pretty good at 6%-7%.

Important: This is what you want to use if you don’t have 10Gbps but you do have 4* 1Gbps NICs for live migration. You can test with compression and LACP teaming if you want/can to see if you get better results. Your mirage may vary . If you have only one 1Gbps NIC => Compression is your sole & only savior.

2*10Gbps with SMB Direct

We’re using perfmon here to see the used bandwidth as RDMA traffic does not show up in Task Manager.

We have no problems reaching the best possible throughput but it’s better (20Gbps, line speed). But now look at the CPU during live migration. How do you like them numbers?

Do not buy non RDMA capable NICs or Switches without DCB support!

These are real numbers, the only thing is that the type and quality of the NICs, firmware and drivers used also play a role an can skew the results a bit. The onboard LOM run of the mill NICs aren’t always the best choice. Do note that configuration matters as you have seen. But SMB Direct eats them all for breakfast, no matter what.

Does all of this matter to you? I say yes , it does. It depends on your environment and usage patterns. Maybe you’re totally over provisioned and run only very small workloads in your virtual machines. But it’s save to say that if you want to use your hardware to its full potential under most circumstances you really want to leverage SMB Direct for live migrations. What about that Hyper-V cluster with compute and storage heavy applications, what about SQL Server virtualization? Would you not like to see this picture with SMB RDMA? The Mellanox RDMA cards are very good value for money. Great 10Gbps switches that support DCB (for PFC/ETS) can be bought a decent prices. You’re missing out and potentially making a huge mistake not leveraging SMB Direct for live migrations and many other workloads. Invest and design your solutions wisely!

When configuring live migrations it’s easy to go scrounge on all the features and capabilities we have in Windows Server 2012 R2.

There is no one stopping you configuring 50 simultaneous live migrations. When you have only one, two or even four 1Gbps NICs at your disposal, you might stick to 1 or 2 VMs per available 1Gbps. But why limit yourself if you have one or multiple 10Gbps pipes or bigger ready to roll? Well let’s discuss a little what happens when you do a live migration on a Hyper-V cluster with CSV storage. Initiating a live migrations kicks of a slew of activities.

First it is establish form where (aka the source host) to where we are migrating (aka the target host).

Permissions are checked, are we allowed to do this?

Do we have enough memory on the target to do this? If so allocate that memory.

Set up a skeleton VM on the target host that is a perfect copy of the source VM’s specifications and configure dependencies on the target host.

Let’s see if we can get a network connection set up and running. If that works, we’re cool and can now transfer the memory.

A bitmap is created to track the changes to the memory pages of the source VM’s pages. Each memory page is copied from the source host to the target host VM during which the memory page is marked clean.

As long as the source VM is running memory is changing, which continues to be tracked in the bitmap and as such that page is mapped as dirty over there. In an iterative process this dirty memory is copied over again and so on. This continues until the remaining dirty memory is minimal. This will take longer if the VM is very memory intensive.

The tiniest amount of not yet copied dirty memory is that part of a VMs state that is copied during “black out”. For this to happen the VM on the source host is paused, the remaining state is copied.

A final check is done to confirm all is well and then the virtual machine is resumed on the target host.

Any remains of the VM on the source host are cleaned up.

That’s actually a lot of work and as you can see copying the state is just part of the process. The more bandwidth & the lower the latency we throw at this part of the process becomes less of the total time spent during live migration.

If you can’t fill of just fill the bandwidth of your 10/40/46Gbps pipe or pipes & you operate at line speed, what’s left as overhead? Everything that’s not actual the copy of VM state. The trick is to keep the host busy so you minimize idle time of the network copies. I.e we want to fill up that bandwidth just right but not go overboard otherwise the work to manage a large number of multiple live migrations might actually slow you down. Compare it to juggling with balls. You might be very good and fast at it but when you have to many balls to attend to you’ll get into trouble because you have to spread you attention to wide, i.e. you’re doing more context switching that is optimal.

So tweaking the number of simultaneous live migrations to your environment is the last step in making sure a node is drained as fast as possible. Slowing things down can actually speed things up. So when you get your 10Gbps or better pipes in production it pays of to test a bit and find the best settings for your environment.

Let’s recap all of the live migration optimization tips I have given over the years and add a final word of advice. Those who have been reading my blog for a while know I enjoy testing to find what works best and I do tweak settings to get best performance and results. However you have to learn and accept that it makes no sense in real life to hunt for 1% or 2% reduction in live migration speeds. You’ll get one off hiccups that slow you down more than that.

So what you need to do is tweak the things that matter the most and will get you 99% results?

Get the biggest pipe you need & can afford. Bigger pipes are always better than lots of aggregated smaller pipes when it come to low latency & high throughput.

Choose the best performance settings Hyper-V offers you. You can choose from TCP/IP,Compression, SMB. Ben Armstrong has a blog post on this Faster Live Migration–Which Option Should You Choose? I’d like to add that you can use NIC teaming for live migration as well and prior to Windows Server 2012 R2 that was the only way to aggregate bandwidth. Now you have more options. I prefer SMB but when I don’t have 10Gbps at my disposal I have found that compression really makes a difference. In my home lab where I have only 1Gbps, the horror, it stopped me from going crazy (being addicted to 10Gbps).

Figure out the best number of simultaneous live migrations in your environments. Well you just read this blog, so now you know. Start at 4 and experiment upwards. Tune it back down if the speed deteriorates. The “best” number depends on your environment.

If you do these 5 things you’ll have really gotten the best performance out of your infrastructure that’s possible for live migration. Bar compression, which is not magic either but reducing the GB you need to transport at the cost of CPU cycles, you just cannot push more than 1.25GB/s trough a single 10Gbps pipe and so on. You might keep looking to grab another 1% or 2% improvement left and right but might I suggest you have more pressing issues to attend to that, when fixed are a lot more rewarding? Knocking 1 or 2 seconds of a 100 second host evacuation is not going to matter, it’s a glitch. Stop, don’t over engineer it, don’t IBM it, just move on. If you don’t get top performance after tweaking these 5 settings you should look at all the moving parts involved between the host as the issue is there (drivers, firmware, cables, switch configurations, …) as you have a mistake or problem somewhere along the way.

Here’s the 3rd episode of the Hyper-V Amigos show cast. As Carsten was overwhelmed with work (running your own business is very hard work) and had some issues with his storage spaces lab due to testing we’re discussing live migration optimizations in this installment.

Carsten Rachfahl and I had a lot of fun again, even during the second take, yes we needed one. Apparently these software thingies require me to click on “record” as there is no intelligent agent yet to act on my intention.

Carsten & I discussing & showing some live migration optimizations

I have written many blog posts on this subject already and I’m sure I’ll write more. Optimizing the use of the hypervisor (Hyper-V) across the entire storage, compute/memory & networking stack is one of my specialties and I enjoy this part of my job very much. I also like to share this information as real.

I’m sure you’ll agree that Hyper-V has come a long way in short period of time and I’m pretty sure we’re going to see Microsoft continue this pace for quite a while.

I have a blog post coming out (it’s in the queue) on my 4 top recommendations for optimal live migrations but here’s a search of relevant blog posts on this topic, and we referred to some of them during our show cast:

When you’re done reading al these posts on live migration you’ll have earned a nice refreshing beverage of your choice .

One more thing, if you like these show casts let us know! Last but not least, I’m doing a demo heavy (only) session at ITProceed on June 12th 2014. Many local experts, community members and I will be around afterwards to discuss these technologies.

Configuring live migration settings on a cluster

In the cluster under Networks, Live Migration Settings you can select what networks are available for live migration and their order of preference.

Basically this setting determines what NICs can be used. It also determines and in what order of preference the available networks can be used by Live Migration. It does not determine bandwidth aggregation or failover. All it does is provide the order in which the redundant networks will be used. It’s up to the cluster service NETFT, Multichannel or SMB Direct to provide the bandwidth aggregation if possible As you can see we use LM/CSV over SMB and as our two NICS are RDMA capable 10Gbps NIC, multichannel will discover RDMA capabilities & leverage SMB Direct if it can be establish otherwise it will just stick with multichannel. If you would team that NIC shows up as just one network. Also not that if you lose a NIC during live migration it might fail for some VMs under certain scenarios, but you cluster nodes will maintain the capability & recover. The names of the network reflect this: LM1+CSV2 & CSV1+LM2 will be used both but if for some reason multichannel goes completely south the names reflect the metrics of these networks. The lowest is CSV1+LM2 and the second lowest is LM1+CSV2, reflect on how NETFT will select to use which automatically based on the metrics. I.e. It’s “self documentation” for human consumption.

Sometimes you might get surprising results. An example. If you’ve selected SMB for Live Migration and you have selected only one of the NICs here. Still when you look at perform you might see both being used! What’s happening is that multichannel will kick in (and use two or more similar NICs when it finds them and if applicable move to RDMA.

So here we select SMB for the live migration type and the two equally capable 10GBps NICs available for live migration it will use them, even if you selected only one of them in the cluster network settings for live migration.

Why is that? Well, there is still another location where live migration settings are defined and that is in Hyper-V Manager. Take a look at the screenshot below.

The Incoming live migration settings is set to “Use any available network for live migration”. If you have this on it will still leverage both as when one is used multichannel drag the other one into action anyway, no matter what you set in network settings for live migration in the Cluster GUI (it set to use only one and dimmed out).

Do note that on Hyper-V Manager the settings for live migrations specify “Incoming live migrations”. That leads us to believe that it’s the target, the node where the VMs are migrated to that determines what NICs get used. But let’s put this to the test.

Testing A Hyper-V cluster with two nodes – Node A and Node B

On the cluster network settings you select only one network.

On Hyper-V cluster Node A you have configured the following for live migration via Hyper-V Manager to “Use these IP addresses for live migration”. You cannot add or remove networks, the networks used are defined by the cluster.

On Hyper-V cluster Node B you have configured the following for live migration via Hyper-V Manager to “Use any available network for live migration”.

As we now kick of a live migration from node A to node B we’ll see both NICs being used. Why well because Node B is the target and Node B has the setting “Use any available network for live migration”. So why then only these 2, why not pick up any other suitable NICs? Well we’ve configured the live migration on both nodes to use SMB. As this cluster is RDMA capable that means it will leverage multichannel/SMB direct. The auto configuration will select the best, equally capable NICs for this and that’s these two in our scenario. Remember the capabilities of the NICs have to match. So no mixtures of 1 * 1Gbps and 1 *10Gbps or 1 * multichannel and 1 SMB Direct.

The confusion really sets in that even if live migrate from Node B to A it will also use both NICs! Hum, that is “Incoming Live Migrations” is not always “correct” it seems, not when using SMB as a performance option at least. Apparently multichannel will kick in in both directions.

If you set both to Node A and Node B to “Use these IP addresses for live migration” and leave the cluster network setting with only one network it does only use one, even with SMB as a performance option for live migration. This is expected.

Note: I had one interesting hiccup while testing this configuration: when doing the latter one of the VMs failed in live migration of the entire host. I ran it again and that one VM still used both networks. All others went well during host migration with just one being used. That was a bit of a huh moment and it sure tripped me up & kept me busy for a while. I blame RDMA and the position of the planets & constellations.

Things aren’t always what they seem at first and it’s good to keep that in mind. The moment you think you got if figured out, you’re wrong . So look again & investigate.